According to the members of the blueribbon committee, the situation was desperate. Their report, released to the Washington press corps, had been blunt, unsparing, and apocalyptic. “We find the existing situation to be so dangerous,” it warned, “that unless corrective measures are taken immediately this country will face both a military and civilian collapse.” The committee proposed to counter the dire threat by the imposition of nationwide gasoline rationing.

Such a report may be easily imagined in one of the future-crisis scenarios currently making the rounds in the White House or the Department of Energy. In fact, however, it was issued on September 10,1942, with the United States nine months into World War II, and it triggered the nation’s first—and, thus far, only—encounter with the full-fledged rationing of gasoline. How the American people coped with so traumatic an experience may be instructive.

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